“WHAT IS HISTORY BUT A FABLE AGREED UPON?” said Napoleon Bonaparte. For Leftist historians in America’s universities, such fables are forged and edited into ideological weapons designed to conjure grievances, condemn enemies, and concoct allies that otherwise might not exist.

But stubborn empirical facts can raise doubts about such ideological fables. This is why in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, Winston Smith worked in a totalitarian government department where facts were buried and history was incessantly rewritten to support Big Brother’s current ideology. “Those who control the present control the past,” wrote Orwell, and “those who control the past control the future.”

One such troublesome artifact was almost reburied and its evidence erased — the skeleton of a 5’10” tall man locked inside a closet of Political Correctness that Leftists expected would never again be permitted to be seen in the light of day.

But last Friday in Portland, Oregon, U.S. Magistrate John Jelderks ruled in behalf of eight scientists who want to study this amazing skeleton discovered in July 1996 in the muddy banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington — bones of contention known since then as Kennewick Man.

Police at first wondered if this nearly 90 percent complete skeleton was the remains of a recent murder or accident victim. The first anthropologist to see Kennewick Man suspected he was older, perhaps a pioneer who died 150 years ago along the Oregon Trail.

But radiocarbon dating gave an age that stunned and amazed all scientists involved. Kennewick Man had died approximately 9,300 years ago.

The problem this raised was evidenced by that first anthropologist’s guess that this was the skeleton of an Oregon Trail pioneer. To him even a cursory glance revealed that this was not the skeleton of an Indian. Among many telltale signs, the skull shape was not that of a Native American — but of a Caucasian, or at least of someone of Caucasoid ancestry such as the ancient Ainu people of Northern Japan or the red-haired skeletons found in graves in China.

This might be the sort of discovery that re-writes history books, as this column previously discussed. Prior to the unearthing of Kennewick Man, Leftist historians taught our children that evil, capitalistic Europeans with white skin had arrived in 1492 to begin centuries of rape, pillage, enslavement and genocide against noble Native Americans.

But if Kennewick Man was Caucasian (and was also found with the tip of an Indian-style stone arrowhead still imbedded in his hip bone), this might mean that the original Americans had white skin — and had been exterminated in a genocide by invading ancestors of today’s Indians.

If so, then Columbus could be depicted in revisionist histories not as an imperialistic European conqueror but as a restorer who was justly reclaiming lands stolen from his distant ancestors by genocidal invaders.

(Similar evidence suggests that the original settlers of South America were black, as this column discussed. They, too, may have been snuffed out in a genocidal holocaust by invading ancestors of today’s Indian peoples.)

At the first hint that Kennewick Man might not be Indian, five Native American tribes in the region banded together to demand that they immediately be given this skeleton of the “Ancient One” for burial so that no scientific desecration — or as the scientists called it, analysis — could verify its genetic kinship.

An idealist might see in this the cultural and religious motivation of today’s Native Americans to protect and honor the remains of an ancestor of their tribes.

A cynic might see these tribes trying to cover up evidence that their ancestors had committed genocide against earlier Americans of a different race — evidence that would greatly weaken Indian claims to moral superiority and the status of victims deserving of sympathy and government benefits.

The Bill Clinton-Al Gore Administration tripped all over themselves in its rush to give one-sided support to tribal demands for the skeleton.

Indians, being one of America’s most government-dependent groups, tend to vote Democratic, and in key elections such as the South Dakota Senate choice this November Native American votes could prove decisive.

But Clinton and Gore appeared to have deeper, more ideological motivations. The Leftist Democratic Party promotes the idea that People of Color are good and white males are bad; that Native American socialist tribalism is good and the greedy individualism brought here by Columbus is evil; that Indian nations are pure and virtuous, but the American nation is sinful and vile.

Rather than let the scientific evidence of Kennewick Man’s bones throw all their long-cultivated Multiculturalist Political Correctness into doubt, Clinton and Gore determined that this skeleton should be seized and given to self-interested Native Americans who would bury it where no scientist could ever find or study it.

Neo-Marxists pretend to represent “scientific Socialism” and claim that they are opposed to religious “superstition” such as “Creationism.” But in this case they were quick to shove science aside in the name of Native American pagan religious beliefs and preserving their own racist ideological agenda.)

Clinton and Gore invoked NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, intended to prevent the theft and illegal trafficking of Indian artifacts and remains, as reason swiftly to turn over this skeleton to regional tribes. NAGPRA, however, requires that a preponderance of evidence show that an artifact or skeleton came from the tribe to which it is to be returned.

But as Judge Jelderks found in his 73-page ruling (here in pdf format), Clinton-Gorebot Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt “did not articulate a cogent rationale that supports his finding of cultural affiliation. The Secretary neither identified the earlier group to which the Kennewick Man belonged, nor explained how he inferred a ‘shared group identity’ over a span of 9,000 years between the Tribal Claimants and this unknown earlier group. The Secretary did not explain how there is the required relationship with the Tribal Claimants, even though the remains appear to be morphologically dissimilar from all modern American Indians, including the Tribal Claimants.”

Babbitt’s highhanded behavior, ruled Jelderks, had been “arbitrary and capricious,” and decisions in this matter by Clinton-Gore apparatchiks at federal agencies “were not made by neutral and unbiased decision-makers in a fair process.”

But while a lawsuit by eight prestigious scientists prevented Clinton and Gore from burying this inconvenient evidence, it did not prevent these Leftists from locking it up at the University of Washington Seattle’s Burke Museum so that scientists could not do analysis on the most complete skeleton from 9,000 years ago ever discovered in the Pacific Northwest.

And, as CBS “60 Minutes” wryly reported, Clinton ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to invoke their authority over American waterway navigation to justify dumping many tons of rock and dirt atop the site where Kennewick Man was found. The Corps then planted the entire site with a mini-forest of fast-growing trees with pervasive root systems.

This bizarre (and under Federal antiquities law, almost certainly illegal) willful destruction of an important archeological site was obviously done to prevent scientists from finding more bone DNA or other evidence of an heretofore-unknown non-Indian population in ancient North America.

Noted “60 Minutes,” this deliberate and speedy burial of the entire Kennewick Man discovery site was done at a cost to taxpayers of about $150,000.

Thusfar, according to lawyers representing the scientists, the government has spent about $3 million taxpayer dollars to prevent scientists from studying Kennewick Man — and to prevent scientific facts from unraveling the academic Left’s red-and-white ideological version of history.

Kennewick Man lost in a struggle 9,300 years ago and might yet be erased from history again. In each generation, history is written and rewritten by the winners. Part of what has made America great is that the best among us prefer facts over fables. This is why we have never yet succumbed to Napoleons, except on some university campuses where petty ideological tyrants rule.